Mekong Tourism Development: Capital or Social Mobilization?

Abstract

The current growth of tourism development in Southeast Asia is not necessarily desirable as a government tool to assist in the economic recovery from the region's recent crisis from late 1997 onwards. The key general questions regardless of location, remain: how can conflicts of interests among various groups of all tourism stakeholders be balanced between global and local levels, and what are the objectives in tourism planning—capital or social mobilization? The first part of this paper describes the application of computer software to determine answers to these questions. In Thailand, a small sample of tourism policy-makers was examined to determine their decision-making styles in tourism planning. A tentative conclusion is that they gave great emphasis to an option's correctness, return for effort, and likelihood of acceptance. Preliminary research findings show that one of the most crucial problems relating to sustainable development centres on the contradiction between the ethics of local involvement in decision-making processes compared with that of capital mobilization. This information helps us understand how the ethical problems arose and suggests how alternative principles such as Buddhist ethics could be developed to increase social mobilization towards local sustainability.